Week 94

  • It’s T-minus 10 days to the release of our first services in private beta. There’s been three priorities for our product teams this week. The first has been to connect together our new Export Readiness service with our new export account. The second has been to finalise the process for extracting data from our existing systems for our private beta participants. The third has been to make sure we’ve covered the bases on our privacy obligations before we release.

  • A collective from across our product teams came together this week to put together some short stories (we’re calling them ‘vignettes’) to paint the picture of how the future might look for our users and our staff members.

    It’s a useful framing device for questioning how we might be able to achieve a specific change in a user journey, or for working through the consequential changes that might be able to happen as a result. With a heavy caveat that these are still a work-in-progress, here’s one we made for our audit staff:

A vignette about the future state for a staff member

  • I presented our work-in-progress vignettes on Friday, when we came together as the Agricultural Trade Group senior executive team for an off-site at the National Museum of Australia. The vignettes were a good conversation starter for a day of reflection on our collective reform journey across the group.

  • Winter in Canberra means lots of morning fog, which was ever the case on Tuesday morning - resulting in a lengthy flight delay and an exciting aborted landing. Nevertheless, it gave me the time to finish reading Never Split the Difference, an enjoyable read about negotiation by former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.

  • This week I came back across this great article from Sean Boots about the myths and perceived-panacea of ‘commercial, off the shelf’ (COTS) software in government.

Here’s a wintery, rainy morning in Canberra on Thursday:

A wintery, rainy morning in Canberra city centre